there's no flowers in the desert
by SkippingThrough
Summary: She falls asleep trying to remember the sound of Ino's heartbeat.
1. Chapter 1

She leans down, looking at the still, pupil-less eyes staring back at her. Waits for Ino to blink, to lose their staring match and burst into breathless shouts -

_"There's no way I just lost to you, Forehead! I demand a rematch!" _

\- louder than a bomb, impossible to ignore. She reminded Sakura of Naruto on days like those. They barely ever breathed the same air, after their academy days, would deny the comparison viciously, but the heartache that struck Sakura like lightning after Ino's death felt exactly like the night she lost Naruto.

That light-headed feeling _can'tbreathewhereamineedair_ that doubled down on her lungs never changed. Sakura could recognize it within an instant.

She swipes at a strand of errant hair. The wind is blowing North, telling her to go home. Sakura wishes it was a real sign instead of a lonely woman's desperation.

She sighs, finally closing her eyes. Ino doesn't blink.

Sakura ignores the crusted trail of blood that dried hours ago as it slipped down the Yamanaka's dented-in forehead. She hefts up her best friend's corpse and carries her further from the battle field.

Five minutes away from the outpost is a cool, dark cave. Deeper inside, fields of stalagmites crop up from the floor of the little cave. The ceiling is similarly dusted in the formations.

Sakura is uncomfortably reminded of Sasori and his _deaddead _eyes. She shakes the image out of her head, jostling Ino in the process. The tips of her long, white-blond hair is already grimy with dried blood and dirt.

Ino would be furious if she could see herself. Sakura's been keeping a mental checklist of the things Ino would shrilly scream over, if she could:

Her appearance.

Her manner of death. ("Who the hell uses bows and arrows anymore? And rocks? I already know they're neanderthals, they don't have to prove it.")

The fact that_ fucking Sakura_ is the one burying her body.

There's no flowers in the desert, either. This would be a perfectly good alternative, except Ino also hates caves.

"You've always been hard to please. I guess I should have expected this," Sakura murmurs to the body.

Her mental image of Ino, acting snooty and immature as an eleven year old fresh academy graduate, fades back into the teenage corpse in front of her.

She carefully set Ino on the ground and takes out the singed tarp in her backpack. Sakura rolls the body into it, wrapping Ino up like a present.

Exhausted, she lies down against the tarp, head pillowed on what she guesses is Ino's stomach. She falls asleep trying to remember the sound of Ino's heartbeat.


	2. Chapter 2

Sakura startles herself into full wakefullness, as per usual. The low levels of anxiety in her gut level off as she conducts a scan of the area.

_No hostiles, _she signs in Konoha Standard. There's nobody else in the cave to see witness her communicating, but she likes to keep her mind sharp.

There was a time when Sakura, a few weeks deep in denial and depression, wandered around the ruined outskirts of Konoha in a daze. Each step forward felt meaningless and the days dragged on as she searched beneath rubble and ruin for any survivors of Pein's attack. With Katsuyu at her side, Sakura choked down dust and tears in the face of her own hopelessness.

She visited the broken compounds of each clan, searching desperately for survivors. As she skirtined around the old Uchiha compound, Sakura realized she had never stepped inside most of these places before and this certainly wasn't how she had envisioned her first look inside would go.

Each broken down home and the corpses strewn around it was another reminder of the generations of shinobi families who had lived and died here. Under any other circumstances, Sakura would have felt guilty taking priceless tomes of knowledge and clearly important scrolls away from their heritage sites.

Unfortunately, hours of empty labor and pulling corpses rotting under the harsh Konoha sun had cured her of a variety of emotional responses. Apathy was, for a time, Sakura's only option.

She shudders, and tugs the memory of Konoha and that final funeral pyre into the back of her mind. The flames reached toward the sun like sunflowers, burning brighter than even Naruto's Will of Fire. They had eclipsed her vision. Sakura remembers her eyes watering from the thick smoke and the naseau of burning human flesh. The smell hstayed with her, gripping her throat lie a vice and locking her appetite, even as she ran away from the evidence of her final visit home.

Sakura was certain it had burned its way into her memory forever, perhaps even embeded itself into her lungs.

Her only hope for days now has been to encounter other fleeing Konoha shinobi or perhaps those, like she, that had been out of the village at the time of the attack. Instead, the only thing Sakura has found so far has been bodies, strewn like shells around a beach. Most had been concentrated near the village's outkirts or around the little farming villages close to Konoha.

Others...Sakura avoids glancing at Ino's corpse. It has long since entered a state of _rigor mortis_.

Clearly, Pein and his allies liked to give chase.

Sakura sighs as she shifts on the hard ground and cracks her joints. She can feel her shishou's judgemental gaze on her from beyond the grave anytime she goes too long with no training or anytime she forgets to passively gather more chakra in the conspicuous seal on her forehead. She keeps hoping that she won't need to use any of these measures, but it's best not to have to find out which moves she no longer remembers in the middle of a fight.

A familiar bitter feeling blooms in the corners of her mouth, wrapping around her head.

_Another tension headache? Just what I need._

Sakura counts backwards from three before abruptly rising. She spares Ino's wrapped body one more tender look and then sets it on fire, in typical Konoha fashion.

With the weight of her perilously small pack on her shoulders, Sakura gathers the rest of her few supplies and runs out of the cave.

_Step one: get the hell out of here. Step two... _Sakura's mind, always her greatest point of pride and her best weapon, doesn't fill in the blank. Instead, she runs.

* * *

warning: exposition central


End file.
